Last week, the night before flying to my aunt's funeral, I was doing some moonlighting translating an employee magazine for a big pharmaceutical company. One of the articles dealt with a complication of cancer that killed my aunt, and I mentioned how distressing this translation was on Facebook/Twitter.
Susan Ager, a former Detroit Free Press columnist and friend of my aunt and uncle, commented that I must feel surrounded by death and sickness. Though I know what she meant (it's how I felt in the '90s while watching my mother and grandparents die), this time around I just felt surrounded by life. Not the uplifting, inspirational kind but the kind that happens while you make plans.
I was in the midst of tons of translating, reporting and doing television commentary while my daughter was off from daycare (a logistical nightmare for two working parents) and then starting school. Plus, two teachers quit at the daycare where I'm part of a three-member board.
It would be easy to talk about the cycle of life but that wasn't what I felt -- I felt more like I was just watching and even assisting in very different phases of very different people's lives. It didn't seem to me that there was any link or cause and effect related to the differing phases, which is what the cycle of life always implied to me. These were just people I know and love going about their lives while I tried to keep my own head above water in mine.
It just seemed like life. Fatalism, I guess.
Which brings me to my Aunt Christy's death. This was a tough one. My uncle, her husband, died in June and though it's romantic that she followed him so closely, I wish she hadn't. She's more than half the reason I became a journalist.
As a kid, we watched lots of Lou Grant and the Mary Tyler Moore Show, which both glorified journalism. Sure there were buffoons in Mary Tyle Moore but man, Animal the photographer in Lou Grant seemed like the person to be not to mention the respect the reporters commanded. And I went to Damon Runyon Elementary, where they told us Damon Runyon was a partier and a journalist, which sounded pretty cool to me. Then we visited my aunt -- as a newspaper publisher, she had a side office in a newsroom and seemed to be in touch with every story that flowed through there. I thought all the energy in the place came from her. Then the guys in the printing plant seemed to respect her and liked chatting with her.
And she and her ex-priest husband represented a kind of quiet intellectualism accented by civil rights and feminism (this was the '70s) that impressed me.
Who wouldn't want to follow that lead?
Christy's now on her way to be interred with my uncle, Martha is comfortable in her new school and work has quieted down. I hope I'm not surrounded by death and sickness again all too soon -- or life, for that matter.
